FATE, believes the father of David Banda, has looked kindly upon his family.

Thanks to the maternal instincts of one of the richest women in the world, he said, his son could now look forward to a life far removed from the one his biological family could offer in Malawi.

Yesterday the 13-month-old boy was flying out of Malawi as it emerged that Madonna had been granted an interim adoption order, giving her temporary custody for 18 months.

David’s future, if he remains with Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie, will be one of luxury. He will, like her two biological children, grow accustomed to travelling between the family’s estate in Britain and mansion in Los Angeles.

Life at the Home of Hope Orphan Care Centre in Mchinji, where David Banda was sent after his mother, Marita, died one month after giving birth, would have given him only a rudimentary education. By his teens he would have joined other local children hawking fruit and vegetables or cigarettes on the road to the border with Zambia, and walking long distances each day to find water.

Lipunga, the village where David was born and where his father and relatives live, has no school, no clinic, no running water, no electricity, and is totally dependent on aid, after years of drought.

There, David would have walked several miles each day to school, had he gone at all. His wardrobe would have consisted of a scrappy pair of old shorts and a tattered T-shirt.He would have spent most of his life hungry.

Disease is rife in Lipunga, infant mortality among the world’s highest and Aids has lowered life expectancy to 40.

“My son would have ended up like me – a man who cannot read and write and he would have married early because I could not have paid for his school fees and I would want him out of the house,” Yohane Banda told The Times.

Local people are primarily subsistence farmers, growing maize and other staple crops. A handful have some cattle and a few goats.

In the village, 94 miles from the capital, only one of some 15 one-room, mud-walled houses has a roof of corrugated iron sheets. No one has a bicycle, but they talk enviously of a man in a neighbouring village who has one and uses it to visit markets looking for the cheapest goods. The community speak Nyanja, the Zambian dialect of Chichewa, the national language.

Fate intervened in the form of a woman of whom, up until last week, David’s father, had never heard. “It is a blessing from God,” Mr Banda, 32, said. “He is so lucky, he will learn many things. I wonder if he will ever come back and see us and what language he will talk.”

This wild trajectory of a boy plucked from one of the world’s poorest countries to enjoy the life of the richest has led to opposition in some circles.

Children’s activists have condemned the adoption as another in the fast-growing “export” of African children, claiming that impoverished youngsters would benefit more from celebrities’ support of local organisations, than being whisked off to an A-list lifestyle.

Malawian law prohibits adoptions by non-residents, but the world’s highest-earning female pop star and her film-director husband have been granted an exemption. Officials refused to elaborate on why the restrictions, which usually require adoptive parents to spend 18 months in the country for assessment, were being lifted.The High Court interim judgment infuriated local human rights groups, who said at the weekend they would file an injunction in a magistrates’ court preventing the adoption. That was deferred after they failed to find a member of the immediate family opposed to the plan.

Madonna has pledged to donate £1.6 million to a campaign to help 900,000 children in the country.

STARS WHO LOOK ABROAD FOR A FAMILY

Ewan McGregor and his wife, Eve Mavrakis, adopted a four-year-old girl from Mongolia in 2004, while they were filming there in 2004.

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